Many websites including almost all major news websites and many smaller websites now provide syndication feeds for facilitating distribution of web content including inter alia text, multimedia, and the like, to desktop computers and personal cellular telecommunications devices. Major news websites tend to maintain a webpage listing syndication feeds covering different topics such as top stories, sport news, financial news, and the like. Syndication feeds each have a unique syndication feed URL at which their most recently updated syndicated information files are available. Syndicated information files are formatted in one of several formats including inter alia RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Atom, and the like. Syndicated information files typically contain syndicated information in the form of short syndicated items and embedded URLs for accessing full stories including inter alia text, multimedia, and the like. Syndication feeds are intended to be updated but update rates vary considerably: some syndication feeds are frequently updated whilst others are irregularly and/or infrequently updated. Syndicated information files typically include an update parameter for specifying its last update, for example, last update time, last update identification serial number, file content checksum, and the like. Syndicated information files are typically several kilobytes in size.
Distribution of web content to users originating from syndication feeds involves two types of Point-To-Point (P2P) Internet pull transactions as follows:
(a) So-called P2P syndicated information pull transactions for fetching syndicated information files from selected syndication feed URLs. So-called feed readers execute syndicated information pull transactions and process syndicated information files for organizing their syndicated items for user review prior to users selectively accessing full stories of syndicated items which they are interested in. Suitable feed readers include inter alia Feedreader available from http://www.feedreader.com. Feed reader processing includes updating new syndicated items, deleting old syndicated items, sorting syndicated items, and the like. Users can manually invoke feed readers to individually browse to particular syndication feed URLs but typically prefer to configure feed readers to automatically browse to a preconfigured list of syndication feeds, for example, directed to top stories, and work and/or pastime related syndication feeds. Feed readers enable configuring different profiles for different syndication feeds in terms of update period, archive size for storing syndicated items, and the like. Users tend to configure their feed readers to execute syndicated information pull transactions more frequently than the update rates at most of the syndication feeds in which they are interested to minimize delays between updates and their feed readers having the most recent syndicated information files. Thus, many syndicated information pull transactions are a posteriori spurious insofar that they do not contain any new syndicated items. Moreover, most users typically review the contents of their feed readers once or twice a day but have a tendency to configure their feed readers to execute syndicated information pull transactions far more frequently, thereby effectively resulting in a posteriori many wasted fetches of syndicated information files.
(b) So-called P2P full story pull transactions for accessing full stories of syndicated items of interest to users. The full stories can be located at syndication feeds themselves or other internet websites. Browsers execute the full story pull transactions and optionally invoke plug-ins including inter alia media players, and the like, to render full stories as appropriate. Feed readers may also include built-in browsers.
Syndication feeds are enjoying increasing popularity amongst desktop computer users partly by virtue that as a pull technology users don't need to register or leave personal information in order to receive updates. This steadily increasing volume of syndicated information pull transactions is beginning to strain syndication feeds and the transportation networks for transporting the syndicated information pull transactions to users. This load is further compounded due to the fact that users have a tendency to “oversubscribe” to syndication feeds, namely, they configure their feed readers to browse to more syndication feeds than they generally have time to review their syndicated items.
Syndication feeds are also enjoying increasing popularity amongst cellular users by virtue of cellular networks having greater bandwidth and the wider availability of personal cellular telecommunications devices capable of supporting feed readers and browsers. However, the steadily increasing volume of syndicated information pull transactions particularly affects cellular data network Quality of Service (QoS) and personal cellular telecommunications devices in terms of power consumption, processing speed, and the like. Moreover, cellular users face an additional problem due to the fact that personal cellular telecommunications devices access full stories in web page formats which preclude them from saving full stories for future retrieval or forwarding to other cellular users such that they have to save or forward links to the full stories. Such web page formats include inter alia WAP, HTML and equivalents such as XHTML, cHTML, and similar technologies.